Official languages

This catalogue counts 202 languages with official status in at least one of its 240 countries and territories, 9 of them sign languages, and 39 are official in more than one place. The count follows what each country's record lists as official. Three records list no language at all: Uruguay, Guadeloupe and Martinique.

An official language is one a government accepts for its own business, the language of its laws, its courts and its schools. Many constitutions name one or several. Some countries, Mexico and Australia among them, have never declared an official language at national level, and a de facto national language does the job instead. The lists here follow each country's record, which can include a language the state uses without a law naming it.

They come from ISO 639, the international standard for naming languages in code. The two-letter set, ISO 639-1, covers the widely used languages, en for English and de for German. The three-letter set, ISO 639-3, codes individual languages far beyond that, so Amis, one of Taiwan's national languages, has ami and no two-letter code. Locale data in computing uses these codes, and so do the addresses of Wikipedia's language editions.

That is how its speakers write its name, and how a phone or a browser labels it in a language menu. The names come from CLDR, the Unicode Consortium's locale data, and from Wikidata where CLDR has no entry. A few languages, most of them signed, have no written name of their own on record, and their cards carry the English name.

23 different scripts. Besides Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic they include Thaana in the Maldives, the Ge'ez script of Amharic and Tigrinya, and Tifinagh for Standard Moroccan Tamazight. Each carries a four-letter ISO 15924 code, such as Latn, Cyrl or Arab, the same code a web page uses to tell a browser which script a passage is in.